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The Need to Compare The Need to Compare Jack Goody’s Historical Anthropology Thomas GRILLOT A highly respected figure in African studies, Jack Goody has become a distinctive voice in the torrent of academic critiques of western ethnocentrism. His work, spanning more than sixty years, has been based on a single ambition: comparison, for the sake of more accurately locating European history within Eurasian and world history. Sir John (Jack) Goody (knighted in 2005 for his services to social anthropology) is a well-known critic of eurocentrism, a variant of the ethnocentrism that the most prominent members of his discipline have fought against since the early twentieth century. He is also known as the author of the “literacy hypothesis,” which since the 1960s has contributed to transforming our understanding of the effects that writing has on our psychology, cultures and societies. At first an Africanist, he turned to Europe, and more recently to China and Turkey, in order to rethink the ties that unite the two extremities of Eurasia, and to explain the breaks in their development that have driven them closer or further apart. An involved scholar, he has played a leading role in the debates that have rocked western social science since the 1970s, when although dominant in scientific discourse elsewhere in the world it was already being called upon to justify this dominance. Strikingly steadfast, Goody has maintained this position, or this stance, at the intersection of disciplines and of academic and popular demands, from his early years at Cambridge University up to his very active retirement.1 So it is important to take his career and his work into account if we want to understand the current state of a recurring obsession, ever since Herodotus, in our writings about human society: comparison. While others, out of caution or from lack of time, often put off the task, Goody felt the need for comparison from an early stage, and 1950s and 1960s anthropology provided a convenient field. Coming from an intellectual tradition hostile to theory, he laid down the conditions favourable to comparison in several different ways, and he applied and tested it in diverse geographical areas and on timescales that connect a good part of his work to a world history covering half of the inhabited world, and stretching from prehistory to our time. Before examining the questions raised by this immense ambition, this essay aims to chart the stages of Goody’s career, and to offer an interpretation of it. Anthropology as a War Veteran’s Choice Goody has acted as his own historian on several occasions. In response to interviewers and audiences, as the need arose to position himself in the history of his discipline, or to redefine its borders, he has on numerous occasions listed influential books, decisive encounters, crucial experiences, and turning points in his career. Failure to recognize the dangers inherent in this self-narrating tendency would lead us to collapse under the weight of 1 Renaissances: The One or the Many?, his most recent book, which he wrote with Stephen Fennell, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010; Goody retired in 1984. 1 the many references, anecdotes and stories skilfully recounted by Goody. I will therefore limit myself here to reconstructing his path into anthropology, and the influence that the Second World War had on his choice. Like many other British and American anthropologists of his generation, Goody likes to recall that the war was the opportunity to encounter the Other – but not the radical Other of non-western or “primitive” societies. While Goody was stationed in Cyprus, for him the Other was first and foremost a peasant world which he saw as unchanged for 4000 years, guided by his readings of the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Chile, and comparison between the tools actually in use and those exhibited in museums.2 The Other was also the Italian peasants of Abruzzo. And finally, it was the many encounters with soldiers of various nationalities in the prisoner-of-war camps in which he spent most of his military service. In short, the Other was first of all non-English; it was also, incidentally, illiterate (and Goody was to attribute to these few weeks living alongside Italian peasants without access to the written word his later interest in the social role of literacy). The war changed Goody’s career, not simply because it made him enter the reality of the Other, but because it did so in resonance with certain texts. Though it entailed a break from the classroom, the war was for Goody a continuation of university by other means – a Grand Tour, twentieth-century style. He was to draw particular attention to his reading, while in captivity, James Frazer’s Golden Bough, a classic work underappreciated by the founders of English academic anthropology who were to become Goody’s teachers.3 The similarity between this anecdote and the intellectual project of returning anthropology to its comparativist roots is no coincidence – although the project as such was of course only to be developed forty years later. In fact, while the war did affect Goody’s career, this was primarily because – as for many other veterans – it interrupted his studies in literature and made them seem less obvious. With the war’s end came a period of vacillation during which Goody, after failing to enter the Colonial Office, finished his degree in four months and then had a brief go at studying archaeology and anthropology. Wanting to return to non-university life, he taught for a while, and considered pursuing a career in sociology, before a grant from the Colonial Social Science Research Council (CSSRC) made it possible to return to Cambridge to write a doctoral thesis in anthropology under the direction of Meyer Fortes, an expert on West Africa and a colleague of Evans-Pritchard. The war, a necessary but not sufficient explanation of his pursuing anthropology, was also the biographical event that emotionally motivated strong personal adherence to the discipline.4 The war provides a motive for the narrative of a conversion to anthropology, concealing the hesitations and shifts that in the space of a few years transformed a would-be colonial administrator in Burma into an expert in West Africa. This lability in Goody’s career cannot be separated from post-war reforms in the British Empire, which provided the funding (through the CSSRC) for his studies. In place of the conventional image of an intellectual who has discovered the world by means of the war, we can see the typical first career steps of an educated British veteran, and a quite early desire to connect the development of intellectual questioning to historical consciousness – also a standard phenomenon among intellectuals. 2 V. Gordon Childe, The Bronze Age, Cambridge, The University Press, 1930, and What Happened in History, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1943. 3 Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, Jack Goody: L'homme, l'écriture et la mort. Entretiens avec Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1996, p. 44. 4 Even before the end of the war, he wrote fictional memoirs in the third person, which he finished only near the end of the century. Cf. Jack Goody, Au-delà des murs, Parenthèses, 2004. 2 The Africanist Becomes a Leading Figure in the Profession In order to find the roots of Goody’s comparativism, we have therefore to focus not so much on the war as on Goody’s education. In fact, after 1945, and for the first time in Great Britain, anthropology was becoming a career, and this context is essential: public funding of the Empire reforms generated the creation of teaching positions, as well as great interest in Oriental and African studies.5 Goody’s career is basically that of all of the anthropologists of his generation who were affected by this “boom”6: with little professional experience apart from his time in the army, he had a few years of academic training before going into the field for two years, and then publishing his doctoral thesis, The Ethnography of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, in 1954. The choice of the Gold Coast was not original, either: in devoting himself to the ethnology of what would soon be Ghana, Goody was following in the steps of his teacher, Meyer Fortes. Like him, a significant part of the profession turned away from research on the Pacific, to concentrate on the more complex societies of Sub- Saharan Africa which Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard had studied in African Political Systems (1940). The study of kinship in relation to systems of property, which Goody was to pursue up to the 1970s, came directly from this turning point in British anthropology, when it freed itself from the functionalism advocated by Malinowski. The first years of Goody’s career were thus prosperous ones for the profession, the membership of which increased tenfold in twenty years. Three generations were active during this period leading up to the 1970s, when he became a professor: that of his teachers educated before the war, his own, and that of his first students. Then came an identity crisis: the collapse of the British anthropological orthodoxy confronted by structuralist assaults, the end of the Empire, and the first criticism of anthropologists’ alleged compromises with colonial governance. As an heir of Fortes, Goody is generally considered to have been a skilful tactician in the power struggles in Cambridge, and he survived the crisis. He became a University Lecturer in 1959, and was elected to a Fellowship at St. John’s College in 1960, where he became a Director of Studies in 1969.
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